business ethic:
Transcript for Todd Herseth’s Ethics Video
Hello, my name is Todd Herseth. I am the business program chair for NAU and I’ve played a role in designing the online business ethics course in which you enrolled in, which I hope you find to be a good experience. I want to share with you an ethical situation that I found myself in many years ago. I was the Director of Development for a nonprofit organization. As a nonprofit, we received a number of donations. Some of them were earmarked for specific purposes. We received one particularly large donation which was earmarked, and I was given the direction to write a letter of acknowledgement thanking them for the gift, and in addition, assuring them that the money would be spent in accord with their wishes. Well, before I wrote the letter, I caught wind within the organization that there were certain members that were pretty high in the organization thinking that it would be nice if that money could be spent elsewhere. Now I was in a bit of a situation, because I had to write a letter assuring them that it would be spent according to their wishes. This was an ethical dilemma for me and the solution that I arrived at was to ask the Executive Director of the organization to sign the letter with me. I didn’t have the authority as the director of development to ensure that the money would be spent the way it should, but of course the executive director did, and by asking him to sign the letter it insured that what I was saying to them would in fact be carried out. So this is an example from my experience of an ethical dilemma in the work place. I want to also share with you why I think it was important for me professionally and personally. Let me refer to an example. We are all familiar with the Enron case as being a notorious case of unethical behavior. I’m sure that the folks from Enron who are the high executives when they graduated from business school didn’t have the thought in their mind, “Hey, I’m going to go down as being one of the most unethical people in the business world.” Early in our professional careers, it is small things where we are tempted to compromise ourselves ethically and I am sure it is the case with the folks at Enron. They made small concessions ethically early on in their careers. Once they made those small concessions, it was easier for them later on to make slightly larger concessions and compromise ethically. I just made the decision at that point in my career with this situation that I was not going to compromise my ethics knowing that if I had made a small concession earlier in my career, it would be easier to justify a little bit larger one and then later a much larger concession. So I stood my ground and drew a line in the sand and said, “Well, I am going to follow my conscience in how I resolve this situation”. I look back at that with no regrets as a consequence of that. Again, if we make small concessions it’s a slippery slope. We can get caught up in that very easily and we have seen many examples of that. In conclusion, please think of ethical decisions as not just another management decision but a reflection of who we are as business professionals. Also, please keep in mind that when we make business decisions that have an ethical dimension, it really has a profound impact on the direction we are taking both professionally and personally in the near and distant future. It just has profound repercussions even later on when we make those types of decisions. I also want to mention that there is a gentleman named Maxwell who wrote a book. The title is interesting: There is No Such Thing as Business Ethics, and the reason he titled the book that way is that some people, he said, have justified their decisions in the workplace by saying, “This is a business decision”. Maxwell said in his book that ethics is ethics, and some people have a set of values and ethics that they follow at home and different set at work, but we have to
follow the same standards for ourselves whether it is in our professional or personal lives. Ethics is ethics so Maxwell is right, there is no such thing as business ethics.
questions:
1-given the ethical dilemma that Todd described,would you have handle the situation any differently? explain.
2- Discuss possible alternative courses of actions to handling/ addressing this ethical dilemma.